Quitcherbitchen about the millennials...and their younger siblings.

I was born in 1970. I grew up with the blue eyeshadow, parachute pants, and Little House on the Prairie crowd. I have had my good years and bad, but I like to think I have grown into some perspective. I have a lot of exposure to differing opinions thanks to my enormous amounts of wasted time on Facebook. I have been thinking about writing on this subject for a while. Millennial and youth bashing. We've all done it. What generation hasn't? I am not writing about your fifteen year old. Teenagers are rough, we should get combat pay, but they come out of it as they reach adulthood in most cases. So, lets take this one complaint at a time. These don't apply to everyone, but just play along. Some of us need an attitude adjustment.

1. They are lazy and entitled.
Guess what? You raised them. By you, I mean an entire generation of rushed, working, overly busy, overly joining, overly competitive, consumer parents. We drank the kool-aid. Two new cars, big house, working overtime, pressing education on our kids as the only key to success and happiness. We ate out, we overindulged, we let them join three sports. We went in debt. This generation is evolving passed the quest to have it all. They shop at thrift stores, they upcycle, they save money, they knit and sell it on Etsy, they buy used cars. Pay attention, because most of us didn't teach it to them. While I pay my huge cable bill/internet/phone bill, they are getting by with a $150 smart tv and a zulu account. Who's the dummy?  We complain about childhood obesity. Guess who hit the gym while their kids ate fruit chews and cheez-its in the daycare? These kids are having to battle the Childhood Obesity/BMI Nazi's with one hand and the Body acceptance/All about that Base crowd with the other. No wonder they are confused. Younger parents? Skip the wii fit and take your kids hiking. Show them birds and let them throw rocks (not at the birds). As for the teens and twenty somethings???Do they all evolve? Hell, no. There are lazy, entitled jerk-offs in every town and every cranny of this world and they aren't all young. Stop stereotyping young people. If you don't do it based on race, don't do it based on age. Period.

2.They don't care.  Right. Like you did? The seventies and eighties were jam packed with sex, drugs, and venereal disease. We littered, we dumped, we drank. The nineties we started throwing condoms and money at every problem. So, who didn't care? These kids and young adults are getting involved. They pick up trash, do fundraisers, grow gardens. They cook, for God's sake. Not because they are latch key kids and mom isn't home. They cook because they try to learn about taste, other cultures, healthy living. They recycle, they plant, they re-use. Some of them hunt and fish and when they do, they follow the poaching laws. They rescue animals, they stand up to bullies. You know what else they do? After years of watching their fathers and mothers go off to war, they enlist. Military millennials took Fallujah and Ramadi, they helped get fresh water to Haitians after the natural disaster, they dug out bodies after Katrina. Millennials guard our embassies, protect villagers, make sure food gets to hungry kids. Don't tell me they don't care.

3. They're on their phone too much. Probably. So are plenty of grown jackasses that should no better than to text and drive, but do it anyway. So do adults in every restaurant I go into. If you have a young child and you gave them a phone, it isn't their fault, it's yours.If you let your child text during dinner or sleep with their phone under their pillow, you failed, not them. We live in the nanny state, and we are the nannies. Every kid needs a phone because they are cheap and we fell for one of the best marketing scams in recent history. The family plan. If your child goes to a public school, "there might be a shooting. They need a phone." If your child is present during a school shooting, they need to be hiding, protecting themselves and others until reinforcements get there. They don't need to be texting you at work. If my niece or nephew are forwarding an article from autism speaks or Humans of New York instead of sending notes in class or reading the porn stuck in their mattress, they are doing better than my generation. If they check the news on the internet instead of watching Jon Stuart, good for them.This next generation is going to be helping you download your life when you couldn't get passed how to change your screen saver. Don't piss them off.

4. They are all liberals. Guess what, no they aren't. You may like that stance, you may despise it. What you shouldn't do is discount the fact that they have a brain. If you want to know what they think on certain issues, ask them. If you don't agree, tell them what you think. Don't assume that every decision they make is based on what Hollywood told them to think. If you think this generation has no faith, who in the heck do you think stopped taking them to church? You don't have to hate other religions to teach a specific doctrine to your kids. Most of you know that I am both Christian and conservative. However, my children have toured Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, attended a Passover Seder meal, attended Iftar feasts during Ramadan, toured Mosques. They've also toured Abbeys and Cathedrals. As for politics? When I was eighteen I voted for who my parents liked. Some of my peers voted for who their parents didn't like. Now we have the Saira Blair's of the world that decided that if our generation wasn't going to fix it, she was going to have to. You also have movements where kids are sending their school lunch selfies to the white house. They speak out, and not everything they say is wrong. You may have the people like Caitlyn Ricci who think suing parents is a moral pursuit, but you also have the twenty something Matt Walsh that is taking on the world with his blogging while bouncing twins on his knees. You have 21 year old Daniel Norris who signed a pro-baseball contract and chose to live in his van on the beach. He didn't want the money to corrupt him. These young adults are thinking for themselves. Despite having a lot of bad lessons crammed down their throats, they are thinking for themselves.

For the Middle Agers:
Every generation has baggage, short-comings, screw ups, scandals, and shitbirds. Cut the millennials and the up and coming young adults a break. People have been complaining about the corruption of our youth since Cain slew Abel. If you keep giving them crap and failing to give them any credit, they will bring you free range granola snacks to your nursing home instead of the Cadbury eggs you asked for. Get to know them, listen, don't just preach. Teach and learn and see the good in them, not just the bad. Give them advice, though. Open dialogue. If you don't, someone else is going to. Our generation is cramming a whole lot of kool-aid, and you need to put your two cents in. Just don't be a jerk about it.


For the Millenials and Young Adults:
Believe.Love.Read books.Check the news. Get involved. Don't join ISIS, just volunteer at hospice or the food bank or the animal rescue. I swear, we aren't as bad as you think. Cook, learn to sew, travel on a shoestring budget,befriend an underdog, an old person, and befriend your parents. They are trying and they might have some interesting stuff to tell you. When I was your age "Nerd Day" at school was an array of insulting garb including broken glasses, pocket protectors, and fake acne. Nerd day at your schools is a Doctor Who t-shirt and a Gryffindor scarf. The same stuff you probably wore last week. That is why you are awesome. More advice? Well, maybe put the phone away and get some sleep. Have kids, lots of them. Kids make life good. Wait, but don't wait too long. Don't be afraid of marriage, kids, or church. They all have their rewards. For the men? Open doors. For every one female that might get offended that you think her weak and unequal, there are droves of women of all ages that think you are the balls. End of rant.

Normal isn't overrated. It is over-reported.

Happy New Year!  I was rolling around some ideas today about what I wanted to write about for my first blog entry. New Years being a time of reflection on family, life, accomplishments vs. failures, got me thinking about our family and how it fits in with the rest of the world. We are living in the age of social media.  There have been articles circulating around the internet waves about parenting styles, how to raise a good kids, "how to not ignore that quiet mom in the group". Subjects from how to get your kids to happily eat kale (you are all lying) to "how to not raise a bully". We read, we forward, we feel good,  or maybe we feel like we suck. 

We live in an age where almost everyone we know has a computer. Most of them are on social media. We also know that what were "beer muscles" in the eighties are now Facebook muscles in the new millennium. Everyone can have their big, bad, ugly, mean opinion with all the trimmings and no tangible backlash aside from the ever dreaded and completely meaningless "unfriend". Unlike the eighties when beer muscles could get you an ass kickin' with a side of loose teeth, Facebook muscles are flexed with impunity. There are people that spend hours a day trolling social media, looking for a fight, and trying to make other people feel like crap. They criticize this woman for a bad eye job, this woman for nursing too long, another for not nursing at all, this man for putting an NYPD badge on his profile picture. You could be on an author page, a charity page, a politicians page,a mommy blog, or for some real fun, The Matt Walsh Blog. The horrible crap some people say to one another would never happen off that keyboard. Something as simple as George W. holding his new grandkid could turn into a heavy barrage of Berkely t-shirt wearing, Che' Guevera worshipping psychopaths frothing at the fingers with ugly comments.

So, the rest of us try to act normal, at least on our own pages. No false moves or some jackass with Facebook muscles might attack. We all look so bloody normal and awesome. I will take awesome, but in reality we are far from normal. I probably embrace that more than some, accepting the uniqueness of my journey, but even I hold back the crazy train when I am on social media. I would imagine we all have a little crazy town going on under our roof.

So, I may give one of my girls a shout out for good grades or give my little berserker some props for speaking in complete sentences or finally getting potty trained. Perhaps I will take awesome pictures on the riverside of my family communing with nature. awwwwwwe.

I may just...hypothetically (ahem, cough cough)...leave out the part about the little berserker dropping a deuce on the river bank while we were skipping rocks. This hypothetically causing daddy to yell, "Jesus, would you look at your son!" and me running to intervene before he prematurely pulled his pants up, or worse,  before the butt-to-hand contamination begins. Wingman daddy digging the e-tool out of the truck bed to bury the offending patty. This all while...again...hypothetically, a group of white water rafters go strolling by hooting and hollering at the spectacle...hypothetically...totally.

People in the "special needs" community like to use the phrase "normal is overrated". Well, I don't know about that. I think it might just be over-reported and the freak show is under-reported. That isn't a bad thing. Everyone doesn't need to know the intimate details of family happenings. Dirty laundry should stay in the hamper and TMI rules do apply. So, if you feel like everyone is normal and you are all alone in your freak show, don't worry. I pulled the little berserker out of a footlocker naked so he could join us for dinner.  Don't ask me, man. He likes confined spaces and randomly sheds his clothes. While I was typing this, the aforementioned berserker also tried to feed me a dog biscuit. It actually took me a second to figure out what he had just stuck in my mouth. Dangerous practice, that.  Outside of making my point today, I am not going to post it all in gory detail for the public consumption on a daily basis, but it doesn't mean we're normal. So, let's agree that normal is completely over-reported, accept the fact that most people are holding out on you,  and just try achieve the happy. Happy can be messy and freaky and completely abby-normal.